


Pinion

by Amand_r



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-15
Updated: 2010-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-13 05:33:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/133521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Margaret wouldn't let him buy her an engagement ring, she just patted his chest and said, 'oh, build me a house, then.'  And when he started buying fixtures and asking Pete and the boys to drop off logs at the property he'd purchased just for them, far away from everyone out in the woods, she knew that it was safe to announce that they were getting married.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pinion

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a crossover with Highlander, and violator was going to be the Kurgan, but that just wasn't practical or interesting. So, I decided to do away with the crossover and just make it what I think it should have been from the start. Sorry, Margaret.
> 
> Written for day six of the 14valentines challenge: [sexual assault](http://community.livejournal.com/14valentines/112138.html).

John made Margaret a softer woman. She smiled when she paid Big Ed to fill up her Chevy at the Gas Farm. She said please and thank you when a teenage Norma took her order at the Double R. She stopped threatening Pete Martell and the logging boys when they tromped through her father's property on the way back from their lunch break, and she even joined the local Methodist church.

She had a job at the Woolworth's in town, and she and Nadine traded stories about the things they saw in town and the silly things their boyfriends did, even though Nadine was in high school still and she was in her twenties; Margaret couldn't help but feel that they were two girls, young and in love (years later, Nadine wouldn't even look her in the eye).

Margaret wouldn't let him buy her an engagement ring, she just patted his chest and said, 'oh, build me a house, then.' And when he started buying fixtures and asking Pete and the boys to drop off logs at the property he'd purchased just for them, far away from everyone out in the woods, she knew that it was safe to announce that they were getting married.

John spent hours out in the leaves and owls, sawing, welding, wiring, creating their new life with his bare hands, every log, every curl of plaster a testament of his love, and she made curtains and tablecloths and re-upholstered furniture scavenged from the junkyard. The rest of the volunteer firemen helped John sink the cistern and the sump pump. They bought dishes at the local Red White & Blue and thought about registering at Horne's department store, but in the end decided that they would rather have cash, which they could use to buy the first year's worth of heating oil for the tank that John had set in the ground the week before.

Margaret wasn't sure when John started to change. She hadn't really noticed it until about a week before the wedding when he'd come back from a brushfire and stood outside the window of her room in her parents' house and stared at her through the glass. Margaret had been asleep, but something had woken her, something that sounded like an animal crying, and she had opened her eyes and there he was, just standing, just staring, jaw a little slack, eyes a little vacant.

He was gone before she opened the window sash to ask him if he was all right, and the remaining smell of burnt motor oil was so strong that she'd had to close the window and turn on the ceiling fan, which she had never before used in her life.

The next morning, when she'd asked him about it at breakfast, he'd just rubbed his eyes with his fingers and told her that she was dreaming things, he was at the fire until four in the morning, and then he'd gone back to the house to shower and sleep for a few hours before he'd had to be at the mill. She convinced herself that she had been dreaming things. Things with the owls never seemed to be real.

The rest of the guys at the mill bought them a better truck, an old Chevy with a working heater and snow tires, and Nadine and the girls threw her a bachelorette party on their lunch break—they put the closed sign on the door, and Jimmy Pittfall from down the street slinked in and took his clothes off, dancing on Margaret's lap to Elvis's "Love Me Tender" while she hid her face behind her hands. A few hours later when Jimmy confessed that he was secretly in love with her, and please, not to marry John, she gave him her best stern face and told him that he was being inappropriate. Jimmy cried and said that he'd had a dream about owls and dirt, and a pool of oil, and that he felt sick every day in this town and that he was leaving. He gave her a chance to go with him, and Margaret shook her head and wondered what Jimmy was taking over at the drug store to make him think these things.

That night she told John about it, about the party and Jimmy, and he laughed and told her that Jimmy'd taken bad acid years before and never been right since, but she saw his jaw working as he kept both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road. And then she hadn't had time to think about it at all, because she was getting married, even if it was at the JP. People were going to be there, and she was going to look pretty for John; she spent hours in rollers and Nadine made her face up and her sister gave her a stern speech about what women did on their wedding nights.

Margaret rolled her eyes; she wasn't an idiot.

 

She was a little drunk on alcohol and dizzy with happiness when he carried her over the threshold of their new cabin that night. He ripped the hem of her dress on a loose nail and she giggled into his shoulder; she didn't even mind then, as they danced around the room, when the phone rang and he answered it for the first time in their house, his face grinning as he said, 'John and Margie Lanterman's house, how may I help you?'

But she saw on his face that it was work, and there was a fire in the new logging site, and they told him that yes, they wouldn't have called but they really needed someone else down here who understood the long-distance coupling, or they were going to lose the whole site. John pulled on his boots, muttering about teenagers and their marijuana, and he grabbed her chin and kissed her soundly, pressing his forehead to hers, promising to be home soon He gave a wink and that she should warm that bed of theirs because it was going to be cold later.

She thought about what her sister had said about 'wifely duties' and shook her head after he left. The first three hours were a blur of pleasant humming, exploration, folding linens, changing into her nightgown, new and white, just a bit of lace at the neck and wrists.

She must have fallen asleep, because the lights were out, and the trees were slapping against the window of the bedroom when she rolled over onto her back to see John standing above her. She squinted to see him in the moonlight, but his face was painted with ash and soot, and she could small the charred wood that had seeped into his clothes and skin. A glass container glinted in this right hand.

He grabbed her by the ruff of her nightgown and yanked, tearing the handmade lace as he lifted her from the bed by the neck. Gray hair whispered across her face, long and stringy, hair that she'd never felt or seen before. John's face was rough and unshaven. She pressed against him as he forced his tongue into her mouth and groaned, not with a kiss, no, something else, something foul.

Her nose filled with the scent of the burned oil, as he let go of her then, taking both of her hands and wrapping the palms around the glass jar in his own. The sides of it were warm and slick. Something viscous ran down her hand and wrist and into the bend of her elbow.

"Margie, this oil is an opening to a gateway."

She pushed the oil back into his hands, murmured that she understood, and didn't he want to take a bath, or she tried to, but his eyes didn't see her. He looked through her when he held her down, yanked the nightgown up, and rubbed a hand lathed with oil on her ass; she tried to push again, but she had never been a match for him before, and her hands slid on the smooth leather of his jacket.

When he was hard and long and hot inside her, thrusting, she turned her head to the side and stared at the owl on the windowsill outside and thought, this is our wedding night.

John grunted and pushed and pulled and turned her over to grind into her from behind, holding her hands behind her back. Margaret crushed her face into the pillow and stared at the fireaxe John had left by the door.

 

The trees ate the wind that night, and she found it difficult to see through the jagged green teeth of leaves and branches. But she kept digging anyway. Her nightgown flapped about her legs, red and brown, and her feet were caked with mud. When she finished, she washed up in the back of the house with the hose, burned the nightgown in the fireplace, and called the Sheriff to report that her husband hadn't returned that night.

As far as she was concerned, he never had.

A week later she stood on the porch of the cabin and watched the wind bend the trees. At times they looked like the bend of a thigh, at other times the snap of an axe. In one flash of lightning, Margaret saw the span of an owl's wings and then a shower of sparks from a tree a quarter mile down the hill as it was struck and splintered.

She gathered up her fire extinguisher and made her way down the slope to the scorched fir, searched for any embers and doused them. The area was littered with feathers and nettles and stirring ash, chunks of wood splintered about. Margaret looked down at the rounded mound of John's grave, stabbed with a limb as round as her thigh. It impaled itself in the dirt and pointed to her, a skeletal wooden finger.

Margaret pulled the charred wood from the ground, slung it over her shoulder, and made her way back to her cabin. She placed the log on John's side of the bed and slid in under the covers next to it, running her fingers down the bark. It smelled like motor oil, but then, so did everything else in the room.

The next morning, she used John's good saw to cut it down to a more manageable size, and when she picked it up, cradling it in her arms, it introduced itself.

She hasn't put it down ever since.

END

**Author's Note:**

> So, the wiki says that the Log Lady was a retired ballroom dancing teacher, but I just couldn't work with that. OTOH, that creates this whole image of Margaret that we don't see, this happy, dancing creature that we just never get to see. I kind of wish we could have seen that. Then again, I like to think that she puts Benny Goodman in her record player and dances about with her log.


End file.
